]]>Nelson Mandela died this week at the age of 95. We look back at the life and legacy of this beloved South African leader who led the movement to end apartheid peacefully in 1994, and later became the first democratically elected president in the nation’s history.

KATE SEELYE, correspondent: On the outskirts of Cairo, members and supporters of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood celebrate the start of a new political era. With nearly half the seats in parliament, the party is set to wield significant influence in Egypt. Newly elected deputy Azza al Jarf calls Egypt’s first free election in decades historic.

The Brotherhood has been waiting a long time for this moment. Formed in 1928 to promote Islam, it was later banned in Egypt and its leaders repeatedly imprisoned. But as secular autocrats have collapsed from Tunisia to Egypt, Islamist parties have stepped into the political vacuum, and groups like the Brotherhood are now riding a wave of popular support with their calls for social and economic justice. On election day in a poor Cairo suburb, Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Beltagy spelled out the party’s goals.

MOHAMED BELTAGY: We were oppressed and intimidated for 80 years, but today we are about to embark on a long journey to meet the needs of the people.

SEELYE: Beltagy and his party weren’t the only Islamists voted into parliament. The Noor Party, which advocates a more fundamentalist agenda, won nearly a quarter of the seats. Together, Egypt’s Islamists make up more than 70 percent of the new parliament. Liberal and youth parties account for the rest. Blogger Mahmoud Salem, who ran and lost in a district of Cairo, says youth candidates like himself didn’t stand a chance against the better known and funded Islamists.

MAHMOUD SALEM: The issue is that if you’re a party that only started three months ago you don’t have the chance to create the groundwork that is necessary. You know, as opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood who’s been around for 80 years, you know. So people vote for whoever they see in front of them.

SEELYE: It was young, secular Egyptians like Salem who sparked last year’s protests with their demands for justice and freedom. They were been sidelined in these elections, but Salem say he has no regrets.

SALEM: Now we get to play the role of the opposition, which is so much more fun, you know: Hey, Islamists, you wanted power? Fantastic. I want social justice now. Get it done.

SEELYE: But others worry democracy has been hijacked by parties they say have little respect for personal rights and freedoms.

PROFESSOR SAID SADEK (Professor of Political Science, The American University in Cairo): It is scary on many issues, especially the social issues, minorities, Christians. Also the status of women, civil liberties, personal liberties in general. What are they going to do with them?

SEELYE: Sadek says Egyptians have legitimate concerns about this parliament’s intentions, given the poor human rights records of Islamist-run countries like Sudan and Iran.

SADEK: Islam has many variety of readings and many interpretations. If they are going to adopt a moderate version, we all support them, but if they are going to adopt a very strict interpretation and they want to impose it on others, we’ll have trouble.

SEELYE: But in this working-class Cairo neighborhood, shoppers have other things on their mind. Many are struggling to get by. At this local food bank shoppers are snap up macaroni and lentils at wholesale prices provided by the Muslim Brotherhood. Nearly half of Egypt’s more than 80 million citizens live on less than two dollars a day, and economic despair fueled last year’s anti-government protests. For decades, the Brotherhood has provided for the poor, offering free health care, education, and other services. Now voters are hoping that the Brotherhood’s history of charitable work and its promises to improve people’s lives will lead to real change.

RAMADAN (Man at Food Distribution): The past government was dishonest. We hope the future will bring reforms.

SEELYE: Egypt faces many challenges. Buildings burned during last year’s protest are reminders of the country’s ongoing instability. Investment is down dramatically, as is tourism, which employs more than 10 percent of the population. Unemployment is surging. Corruption is rife. Given the country’s deep problems, the Brotherhood’s leaders say their priorities will be rebuilding Egypt’s economy and infrastructure, not pushing religion. Ossama Yassin is a Muslim brotherhood deputy in parliament.

OSSAMA YASSIN (Member of Parliament): We don’t want what’s known as a religious state. We want a modern, civil, democratic state belonging to the people.

SEELYE: Sensitive to concerns about an Islamist agenda, the Brotherhood has been moderating its religious language and emphasizing its respect for the rights of other religions and groups.

YASSIN: There is no basis for the liberals’ fears. The state we seek will guarantee freedoms and rights, like the freedom of religion and speech, the right to form groups and political parties, and the right to demonstrate.

SEELYE: By contrast, the Noor Party is calling for a religious state. This summer many of its fundamentalist supporters, known as Salafists, gathered in Cairo to demand an Islamic caliphate. Salafists once shunned democracy, claiming it gave the laws of man precedence over those of God. But today democracy offers them a chance to press for harsh religious legislation. Tarek Shaalan is a founding member of the Noor Party and holds a PhD from the University of Central Florida. He says his party seeks social justice and the strict application of Islamic law, including banning alcohol and segregating the sexes on Egypt’s beaches.

TAREK SHAALAN: The reason I want to make it segregated so I want to make the woman feel more comfortable, you understand me? Don’t look at Islam that we’re bringing a problem. No, we bring the solution, not the problem, okay?

SEELYE: Hard-line Salafist views have proliferated on religious channels here. It’s not uncommon to hear preachers like Yasser Borhami, a founder of the Noor Party, accuse Christians and Jews of being infidels. This kind of talk deeply worries Egypt’s Coptic Christian community of more than four million. Over the past several years, attacks on their community have grown. Churches have been burned and Copts killed. Salafists have been blamed for inciting sectarian violence, a charge Shaalan denies.

(speaking to Tarek Shaalan): You acknowledge that there have been growing attacks on Christians in this country?

SHAALAN: Well, I don’t want to see it this way. It’s not because of religion. It’s because of lots of other things, you know?

SEELYE: The Noor Party’s positions have been criticized by the Muslim Brotherhood. The two Islamist parties are rivals, but in Cairo cafes where Egyptians debate the future, some worry that Noor’s ultraconservative agenda may pull the Muslim Brotherhood to the right. The best protection for minority and women’s rights lies in the drafting of Egypt’s new constitution, according to Coptic community leader Mona Makram Ebeid, who is also an advisor to Egypt’s ruling military authority.

MONA MAKRAM EBEID (Member of Advisory Council to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces): I think the biggest battle now that we all must focus on is the constitution.

SEELYE: Makram Ebeid says parliament will appoint an assembly this spring to draft the constitution. She insists it must address the concerns of all of Egypt’s communities.

MAKRAM EBEID: I hope that the majority of the Muslim brothers, who are much more moderate and much more professional, will be able to have a fair constitution which takes into consideration the rights of every individual in this country, of every citizen in the country, whether it’s economic rights, social rights, political rights, religious rights, cultural rights.

SEELYE: In Tahrir Square, where the protests began just over a year ago, demonstrators continue to demand those rights. Democracy is very fragile here. Egypt is now run by a heavy-handed military which took over when Mubarak stepped down. The generals say they’ll transfer power after presidential elections this summer, but some have doubts. Nevertheless, Islamists long banned in Egyptian political life have new responsibilities and a new sense of accountability. And Makram Ebeid believes that will have a moderating effect.

MAKRAM EBEID: So I don’t think that they will be able so much to impose their own views or change the personality of Egypt as they wish, because I think that this will make them lose their popularity. The more there is an opening to democracy, the more the process of democratization will be, will go ahead, and the more they will come more to the center.

SEELYE: While some might disagree, few dispute the importance of Egypt’s democratic opening. The test will be safeguarding the process so that future voters can choose to re-elect their parliamentarians or not.

Should the American people harness their admiration for the military to revitalize the virtues of democratic engagement? Can we harness this admiration without undermining our ability to keep our militaristic overconfidence in check, especially in the face of increasing economic and military competition from China and beyond?

President Obama’s State of the Union address frames his understanding of the challenges and opportunities we face with the suggestion that emulating the virtues of America’s armed forces would enable us to become a more cohesive and mission-focused community. The challenges he notes are well-known—economic stagnation, declining standards of living, gross inequality, and decreasing confidence in our power both to improve our lot at home and maintain our influence abroad. For the president, however, America’s economic and geopolitical prospects are better than many believe. What we should really worry about is the increasingly prominent role that political cynicism and cultural and religious difference-mongering play in our political life. As the president rightly understands, cynicism about Washington rarely translates into energetic local efforts to address the inequalities in our midst or to put constructive pressure on our representatives for “nation building” here at home. With noteworthy understatement, the president suggests that our tendency to “obsess over [our] differences” is undermining our ability constructively to confront our challenges and opportunities. The problem is as much about our political culture as it is our political policies. The president suggests that the military provides the nation and its leaders a much-needed example of joining together in trust to accomplish a common mission.

What are we to make of this claim? To an extent, President Obama is simply calling for more cooperation in American politics. This is a valuable point, as far as it goes, but is uninteresting. If we take President Obama to suggest something bigger, then we may understand him as echoing ideas from the roots of American progressivism and replaying some of its dilemmas. John Dewey once argued that Americans were the inheritors of a democratic faith in our ability to redress social problems through conversation and cooperation. This faith, Dewey argued, is implicit in our very way of doing things, despite the still-powerful, obfuscating influences of superstition, moralism, and ideological rigidity. What we need, Dewey claimed, is to make this faith “explicit and militant,” to embrace it self-consciously as a source of our common resolve (John Dewey, A Common Faith (Yale University Press, 1934, p. 87)). Made militant, democratic faith can propel what William James once called “the moral equivalent of war”—the marshaling of civic passions for a cohesive social effort against the sorts of inequality, hopelessness, and degradation many Americans now face. For Dewey, however, democratic militancy was deeply distrustful of American militarism. War, Dewey recognized, can lead to forms of social and political discipline that are antithetical to democratic cooperation and exchange. For the democratic tradition descended from Dewey, therefore, the challenge of American life is to identify forms of democratic solidarity that do not feed off militarism abroad.

President Obama plays on these ideas—with a twist. For the president, the end of the war in Iraq, and our decreasing commitment in Afghanistan, provides more than a much-needed infusion of investment dollars that we could turn toward more productive purposes. It allows the nation to turn its militant energies from imperial policing abroad and refocus them at home. By nursing our admiration for our military’s virtues, he suggests, we can transform our beleaguered democracy into a more cohesive and mission-focused political community. Further, we can transform our admiration for the military vocation into a greater estimation of our own vocation as citizens.

The realism of this suggestion is immensely attractive. Rather than condemning the militaristic energies that got us into Iraq and Afghanistan, the president attempts to redirect those energies to more democratic purposes. William James would have been proud. Yet there are dangers here. The president’s vision of a militantly democratic community—a community characterized by at least some of the martial virtues—depends implicitly on the very militarism that the president was widely admired for criticizing. The mission-focused social cohesion that he seems to propose is fed on a diet of military exploits, of Navy SEALs working as a team to kill terrorists in far-off places.

Unless the president is merely cheerleading for more “teamwork” in American politics—an idea scarcely worth hearing—he is suggesting we buy an expanded sense of and passion for citizenship with the coin of militaristic enthusiasm. Instead of taking the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an opportunity to rethink the vice of militaristic overconfidence, President Obama proposes simply to reduce American military action to a minor drama that gives the larger drama of domestic democracy its energy. As long as the military drama remains minor—for example, with small special operations units engaging in targeted strikes—it provides the necessary thrill without provoking the more destructive forms of solidarity to which militarized societies are prone.

The problem with this view, as I see it, is that, once the bitter lessons of the Bush-era wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are old news, there will be little to prevent an American society fed by militaristic enthusiasm from giving in to the temptations of military power. Especially in future periods of uncertainty and threat, a political society that sustains itself through an embrace of martial valor will seek to discipline itself in ways more in keeping with war than democratic ideals.

Democratic citizenship undoubtedly requires courage, selflessness, and teamwork. It takes courage to make yourself vulnerable to viewpoints with which you seriously disagree. It takes selflessness to make the care and upkeep of the community a priority alongside the demands of earning a living for oneself and for a family. It takes teamwork to organize people effectively to make a difference in the life of a community, especially in the face of entrenched interests. But one may well question whether it is plausible or desirable to promote these virtues by harnessing the nation’s admiration for the military.

Howard Rhodes has taught at the University of Iowa and is currently is a J.D. candidate at Duke University School of Law. His research interests include the ethics of war, international humanitarian law, and religion and international relations.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: In a region that’s seen civil wars and bloodshed, Ghana has enjoyed years of peace.

Church leader: May somebody leave this service knowing that their tomorrow is better than their today…

DE SAM LAZARO: In its packed churches there’s a palpable sense of optimism about Ghana’s future.

REV. FRED DEEGBE: I wish I could say we’ve reached the Promised Land. We are quite close to it, we believe.

DE SAM LAZARO: The first building block to Ghana’s relative prosperity has been a free press.

Radio announcer: This is your show, the unique breakfast drive….

DE SAM LAZARO: Almost everyone listens to the radio in Ghana and lively political give and take is a breakfast staple. Tempers flared close to boiling point at times in the studios but only until the show was over. All was quickly forgiven. In a continent where long-running dictatorships are the norm, Ghana has enjoyed two decades of thriving democracy. Two incumbent leaders have lost in general elections. In 2008, the margin was less than one percent. Yet on both cases the sitting president stepped aside, and power was transferred peacefully.

PROFESSOR EMMANUEL GYIMAH-BOADI (Executive Director, Ghana Center for Democratic Development): This is the first time we’ve had both economic growth and political stability and freedom.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ghana was the first African colony to gain independence back in 1957, from Britain. It had its share of autocrats and military coups until the early 90s, when long ruling military strongman Jerry Rawlins stepped aside and allowed democratic elections. Ghana has seen steady economic growth ever since. It exports gold, diamonds and cocoa beans, and now new wealth awaits.

Video announcer: In June 2007, Kosmos struck gold…

DE SAM LAZARO: Major offshore oil reserves have been found here and the first oil revenues began to flow last December. Across Africa the discovery of such riches, especially oil, has become known as the “resource curse.”

DEEGBE: Instead of having oil be a source of prosperity and progress for this nation we just allow a few people, very corrupt people, to amass this wealth and flaunt it to all of us, and we want to work towards this not being the story of Ghana.

PATRICK AWUAH: Ghana has been very fortunate to have oil after democracy and not before. Because that democracy is going to influence how Ghana manages its oil wealth.

DE SAM LAZARO: Patrick Awuah is one of a growing number of overseas Ghanaians who’ve returned. He went to college in the US, then worked at Microsoft. He started a university called Ashesi or “beginning.” Ghana’s fledgling democracy needs ethical leaders he says.

AWUAH: We’ve borrowed the model of the liberal arts and sciences as the way to do that, that teaches broad perspectives, a deep ethos, a deep concern for ethics and a specialization.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ashesi has 450 students and will soon triple that number in a new campus being built just outside the capital, Accra, with funds from the World Bank and other investors. Students and alumni we talked to echoed the school’s values

NAA AYELEYSA QUAYNOR-METTLE (Business Major, Ashesi University): You are training ethical leaders, entrepreneurs who are going to take over in terms of the integrity, in terms of sharing the national cake or the national pie among everybody so that the majority of the Ghanaian nationals are not eating the drops or the crumbs from the table, but then they are sharing equally.

DE SAM LAZARO: For now, Ghanaians are hardly sharing equally. There’s still deep poverty in rural areas, where the majority of Ghana’s 22 million people live. Development experts say the best way to attack poverty is to create jobs and improve the rural economy. A number of efforts have begun to do this. For example, shea nuts are a major export. They’re processed in Europe and America into shea butter, used in skin creams or as a food additive. Now several small processing enterprises have been set up in Ghana, supported by private aid groups as well as the US government. Some are mechanized but hundreds of women are employed in traditional processing, kneading a dough that comes from boiling and crushing the nuts to release the prized shea butter.

RITA DAMPSON (Small Business Owner): When you pick the nuts and sell, that is just the end of it, but when you process it into butter, the profit you can get to support your children by paying their school fees.

DE SAM LAZARO: So there is more profit than if you process the nuts?

DAMPSON: Yes, please.

DE SAM LAZARO: There’s a long way to go. Ninety-five percent of Ghana’s shea nuts are still exported raw, and processing is even more difficult with what is still Ghana’s chief export: cocoa beans. Very little chocolate is made anywhere in Africa because of a lack of refrigeration or milk. So the emphasis here instead is on getting a better price. Kojo Aduhene Tano and his neighbors belong to Kuapa Kokoo, Ghana’s largest cooperative. It was set up 20 years ago with the help of British aid group called Twin Trading. Its buyers have pledged to pay higher fair-trade prices. The coop even owns part of a fair trade chocolate line called Divine, sold mostly in Europe and online in the US. Nationwide, the coop has 64,000 members, and its profits have paid for community wells, credit unions, and schools. It’s hardly made anyone rich. Fair trade does not have a fair share of the chocolate market. Kuapa accounts for just five percent of cocoa growers in Ghana.

KOJO ADUHENE TANO: We need more money from you.

DE SAM LAZARO: People in rich countries need to buy more fair trade chocolate, he says, even as I discover that he got his first taste of it very recently.

(speaking to Tano): How old were you when you first tasted chocolate?

TANO: I was 48 years.

DE SAM LAZARO: You were 48 years old?

Life is still tough, but Kojo Tano is much more optimistic about the future. He only went through eighth grade, but his six children are being educated. The two oldest are away in college.

TANO: When I grow old they will look after me.

QUAYNOR-METTLE: This is the best times to be a young person in Ghana.

DE SAM LAZARO: That optimism is echoed in the capital, especially among young people.

QUAYNOR-METTLE: There’s the oil find, Vodafon has just come to settle, there’s KPMG, there’s Price-Waterhouse, there are all the giant multinational companies coming in. The opportunities are just overflowing.

DE SAM LAZARO: Whether it’s in big oil or tiny shea nuts, Ghana’s challenge will be to make the benefits flow more equitably, also to keep its commitment to democracy and freedom of information. Religious leaders in this largely Christian country will have a key role in all of this.

DEEGBE: With the advent of oil, there is a civil society oil and gas platform who are watching, who are keeping vigil over everything. There’s even a faith-based organization, coalition between the Christian Council of Ghana and the Ghana Pentecostal Council. Between those two you have a majority of Ghanaians, and we are extending that a third level to add a coalition that involves the Muslims, and what we want to do is to monitor what comes in.

Radio newsreader: The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation has for the second time lifted a total of 994,691 barrels of Jubilee crude oil …

DE SAM LAZARO: For now, oil revenues are being meticulously reported. How they should be monitored and spent is an on going debate that will escalate as elections approach in 2012.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Accra, Ghana.

]]>Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum formally announced his candidacy for president today (June 6, 2011). Santorum is a Roman Catholic who advocates conservative social and fiscal views. Watch excerpts from an April 28, 2011 address at the National Press Club where Santorum discussed faith, freedom, and foreign policy.

When President Obama spoke last night about the military intervention in Libya, he confronted a public both stunned and skeptical.

The military action was the product of a complex set of political considerations undertaken at great speed. The rapidity of the political run-up to the initial attack rendered ordinary processes of democratic consultation confused and confusing. Despite the fact that the attack on Libya was legally authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, thus sanctioning the action with the highest form of justification purportedly representing international consensus, many people in America and abroad continue to find the moral and political justifications for the act unclear or unconvincing. Many citizens are skeptical, in particular, about the extent to which protecting civilians represents the actual motive for the undertaking. While the president’s speech forcefully defended the humanitarian grounds for the Libya intervention, it also suggested other, arguably more powerful motivations for using force against the Gaddafi regime. Attacking Libya, the president suggests, is not simply an act of liberal humanitarianism, but of fidelity to America’s revolutionary origins.

President Obama’s principal justification for attacking the Gaddafi regime was to prevent a massacre in the city of Benghazi. Against the background of a history of foot-dragging and inaction by previous American regimes in the face of humanitarian crises, President Obama and his advisors determined that it would be better to use force early rather than “wait for images of mass graves” to flood television screens around the world.

This decision carries enormous risks. It justifies the use of force by reference to a plausible, but still hypothetical scenario in which the Gaddafi regime slaughters civilians by the thousands. It takes literally the hyperbolic threats of a dictator for whom hyperbole is a basic modus operandi and uses those words as proof positive of atrocious intent.

The president’s judgment may in fact have been correct. Perhaps Gaddafi’s treatment of the rebellious population would have involved massacre, mass graves, systematic rape, and other horrors of mass atrocity. But we will never know, and while it is better never to know such things, this not-knowing leaves the president—and the American people—with a situation in which the principal justification for using force is underdetermined.

A great deal of the president’s speech hinges on the extent to which his audience accepts his claim that civil war in Libya would involve “violence on a horrific scale.” The president does not clearly succeed in distinguishing the violence in Libya from the violence in other countries such as Yemen and Syria. This makes him vulnerable to claims that his administration is being inconsistent by attacking Libya but ignoring other situations. President Obama essentially sidesteps the issue by simply acknowledging that America cannot use force everywhere while asserting that this cannot be a reason for inaction in the present case. It is true that intervention in one case does not commit one to a perverse ethic of consistency demanding intervention in every case. But if Libya is not clearly distinguished by extraordinary violence, then the president’s claim that protecting civilians is the primary purpose of intervening in Libya is very weak indeed.

Perhaps, however, the protection of civilians is only one reason for using force in Libya, one that is most acceptable legally and internationally but which is essentially on a par with other reasons for action in this case. The president mentioned the desire both to send a signal to other authoritarian regimes in the region that their violence will not go unanswered and to assist the self-determination of the Libyan people. This is where President Obama’s remarks about American political identity and revolutionary origins are relevant. According to the president, passivity in the face of the Libyan rebellion would have been a “betrayal of who we are” as a nation. America is a nation born of a revolution. Our revolutionary origins have left an indelible mark on our national mythos, our sense of ourselves in our grander moments. It inclines the American people toward sympathy with others who take up arms to fight for freedom and, in some cases, commits us to coming to their aid, through force of arms if necessary. For us, defending human dignity sometimes involves using force to support a rebellion. Or so suggests the president. If one accepts this as a plausible account of how Americans justify the use of force—an account focused more on notions of national identity and revolutionary values than on human rights or humanitarian protection—then one is presented with an account more in keeping with America’s ongoing efforts to shape the global environment according to its revolutionary values.

If America’s identity as a revolutionary regime is crucial to how the president justified the use of force in Libya, then the intervention could amount to a dangerous and destabilizing act of “exporting the revolution.” But America, according to the president, is not only an “advocate of human freedom.” It has also acquired a hard-earned identity as an “anchor of global security.” American revolutionary values, on this account, cannot be understood independently of the concern to preserve global order by supporting international institutions, securing cooperation and consensus, and observing the realistic limits of military force. From this point of view, what distinguishes Libya from other situations is not the severity of its violence, but the fact that the opposition to Gaddafi seems actually to have organized itself into a genuine rebellion. At the beginning of the debate over Libya at least, the Libyan rebels seem to have organized themselves sufficiently to promise both an effective armed resistance and a potential provisional government in the wake of Gaddafi’s demise. This perception of rebel organization seemed to answer the concern that any intervention not result in broader political destabilization. We know now that the Libyan rebels are poorly organized, untutored in the art of government, and largely unknown. Time will tell, then, whether the American administration’s support of Libya’s rebellion will cause harms disproportionate to the goods achieved.

Whatever the future brings, one cannot understand adequately the intervention in Libya without coming to terms with the dance between nationalism, liberal internationalism, and political realism in the president’s speech. When the claims about international consensus and humanitarian concern break down under critical scrutiny, only the claims about national values remain. These national values, and the national identity they presuppose, need not and should not be understood independently of humanitarian concern. Without vital notions of national identity and accompanying notions of honor and fidelity, however, humanitarian aspirations lack ways of actually motivating action.

None of this, of course, answers the question of whether the intervention in Libya was just. But any moral judgment depends upon first acquiring an adequate description of the act under question.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: As the so-called Arab Spring spread out from Egypt and Tunisia, the New York film makers Oren Rudovsky and Menachem Daum were in Israel listening to the hopes and concerns of Palestinian Arabs and Israelis. Here is a sample — unscientific but still revealing.

SHMUEL GROAG (Israeli Architect): The revolution in Egypt, the first reaction of the Israeli public was kind of being in panic as if, you know, you see democracy on one side and people are panicking.

SHWECKY (Israeli Environmentalist): Listen, the situation is not good for us or for them, because there won’t be a strong leadership, and we are the ones who have to be strong or else they’ll wipe us out.

DAFNA: (Israeli Sociologist): I understand the fear of Muslim Brothers, but it doesn’t seem that’s what people in Egypt or in Tunisia want. They really want freedom, and I think we should trust them on what they want. They want to live properly. They want to have jobs. They want to live like everybody else.

ROBBY: (Israeli Founder of Organ Donor Society): I think we need to focus on democracy, human rights, freedom of expression, and hope in the marketplace of ideas that tolerance of other people in the region will play out to Israel’s benefit.

SHEIK NAMIR: (Palestinian Historian): The Palestinian people have had a lot of problems. Every time an event like that happens in an Arab country it’s good for Palestine. Every flag raised calls for the liberation of the Palestinian people, and we’re witnesses to that.

TAHU: (Palestinian Poet and Elder): We are now in front of a bright, new beginning, hopefully. Look at the Europeans. They are supporting the Libyan people, not their rulers. Before they used to side with the rulers. Now everybody knows the truth and feels sorry for the Palestinian people and all other people who are oppressed by their governments, as if they were imprisoned.

JALAL AKEL (Palestinian Businessman): All this will have an impact on the Palestinian youth, who will be affected by the events in the Arab world. Now they can claim back their freedom the same way they see it happening in Egypt and Tunisia and hopefully soon in Libya.

DAFNA: You know, something is changing, and I don’t know but I think it will come here. It’s very difficult to believe that the whole Arab world will be in riots and Jerusalem and the West Bank are going to be quiet.
ABERNETHY: The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics has released figures showing that in the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, there are 5.5 million Palestinians, and 5.8 million Jews. Because of their higher birth rate, the number of Palestinians is expected to equal the number of Jews in about three-and-a-half years.

]]>As Congress prepares for March 10 hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims called by Rep. Peter King of New York, watch highlights from a recent Capitol Hill briefing on Islamophobia in the United States hosted by the Arab American Institute and the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Speakers included Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute; Matthew Duss, national security editor for the Center for American Progress; Deepa Iyer, executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together; Suhail Khan, senior fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement; and Alejandro Beutel, government and policy analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: There was jubilation in the streets of Egypt Friday (February 11) after President Hosni Mubarak finally decided to step down. He handed power to the military’s Supreme Council. The Council pledged to meet protestors’ demands for a peaceful transfer of authority that will lead to a free democracy. Meanwhile, debate continues over the role religion could play in a new government. Kim Lawton and I examine the week’s dramatic developments in Egypt with Geneive Abdo. She’s a longtime Middle East reporter and author of the book “No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam.” She’s a fellow and analyst at the Century Foundation and National Security Network. Welcome to you.

GENEIVE ABDO: Thank you very much.

ABERNETHY: Geneive, one way or another there’s going to be a new government in Egypt. What can we say about the degree of religious influence that we can expect in that government?

ABDO: Well that, of course, Bob, is the question everyone’s been asking, and I think that there’s no doubt, I mean as everyone has been reading about this big organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, that they will have a role in the government. I mean there’s no doubt about that.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: And that’s different, right? I mean, they’ve been not having an influence, and so this would be a change?

ABDO: Yes, I mean, they’ve been a banned party, so this is a huge, huge change in Egyptian history, and they’ve been in Egypt since the 1920s, so this will be their first time to actually enter government.

ABERNETHY: There was a poll that came out this week taken by phone in Cairo and Alexandria asking questions about these things, and a very low percentage, 15 percent, said they approved of the Muslim Brotherhood. Has there been a change since years ago in that as a new generation has come up?

ABDO: Well, I think that the statistic that people that have used is 20 percent generally—that if there were free elections today, 20 percent of Egyptians would vote for Brotherhood candidates, but I think that could be sort of an underestimation.

ABERNETHY: But so what would that mean in a government if the Muslim Brotherhood or any strongly Islamist group had influence?

ABDO: Well, there are a lot of parties in Egypt. There are a lot of political parties, as we all know. Some of them are secular, some are nationalist. The Brotherhood is only one of them. However, the Brotherhood is very well organized, and they’ve been around for a long time. They’re a social, also, organization. They run hospitals. They do a lot of sort of social work in Egypt. So they are very, very influential.

ABERNETHY: But in terms of policies, what would it mean—a policy, for instance, of Egypt toward Israel or toward the United States?

ABDO: The Brotherhood’s position today—and actually one of their leaders has been on television answering that question and he’s been reluctant to answer. He says we don’t know yet. Let’s not talk about foreign policy. But historically, the position of the movement has been against the peace agreement with Israel.

LAWTON: One of the issues I’ve been interested to watch is different representatives from the Muslim Brotherhood this week were sort of doing a Western PR campaign, and many of them said we want to have democracy but we don’t want it to look like American democracy per se, and they said they do want to see Islamic values somehow incorporated into a new government. But I think that’s what has people wondering, well, what does that mean in terms of everyday life in Egypt?

ABDO: Yes, and I think that this is something—I mean, if you can imagine, even for the Brotherhood I don’t know how they could answer this question, because they’ve never been in power. But I think that what they want—and they’ve been very clear they are for democracy, but as you say, not a Western–style democracy, and they want—whatever government the new government comes to be in Egypt they want it to reflect the values of the society.

ABERNEHTY: What does that mean, “the values of society”? Does that mean the same as strongly Islamic values?

ABDO: Well, I’ll just give you an example, okay? When the Brotherhood wrote a draft party platform three years ago, they said that they wanted a group of scholars to vet laws passed by the parliament to make sure that they conformed with Islamic values, so that’s one thing they have proposed.

ABERNETHY: For instance, relating to women?

ABDO: Relating to women, relating maybe even to, you know, what students learn in school, relating to whether women wear headscarves. They have said they won’t make veiling mandatory. They have said this.

ABERNETHY: Would an Islamist government or a government with strong influence from the Muslim Brotherhood—would it be different as far as attitudes towards the United States are concerned?

ABDO: I do think so. I think that we have to be very careful not to be alarmist at this point, but I do think that not only the Brotherhood but many Egyptians actually believe that they should be sort of not so reliant on the aid that they receive from the United States, and they want to be more in charge of their own destiny.

LAWTON: There’s been a lot of different countries that have tried to incorporate Islamic values and democracy. What are the challenges? You know, some people say, is democracy compatible with Islam? Is this a new experimental point?

ABDO: I think it really is, and if we, even though this has been written about so much this week, I think if we take the two models we know of now, right, Iran and Turkey, I think that we are looking at a future Egypt that resembles Turkey much more than it resembles Iran. And Turkey, let’s face it, I mean Turkey’s been very successful. They have a vibrant economy, and they have so far been able to walk this tightrope, and I know that that’s something—

ABERNETHY: So we would not be looking at a theocracy.

ABDO: Definitely not. I don’t think—that is definitely not coming to Egypt.

ABERNETHY: What about the other religions in Egypt—the Copts, for instance, ten million of them? What’s the outlook for them in a new kind of government?

ABDO: The Copts, as we all know from reading the papers, have been the target of a lot of violence in Egypt, and I think that we know also that some of this violence has come from the state security services and the forces. So if there is a new state presumably there will more religious tolerance, I mean, we can only hope so. Just today, for example, there was a report that the current interior minister may have been involved in the attack on a church in Alexandria.